Letters from the River

For a whole year I wrote to her from the bank of the Gambia. I never sent any of the letters. I kept them in a tin box that had once held tea, and every Sunday I would take the box out to the water and read a page or two, standing where the reeds were tallest.

Her name was Aissatou. We had grown up in the same compound, drunk from the same well, argued over the same broken bicycle. When she went to the city to study, something in me went quiet, and I could only wake it up again by writing to her.

I wrote about small things: the price of onions, the new mosque in the next village, the way my mother laughed at her own jokes before finishing them. I wrote about the boat that a boy in the village had built out of nothing, and how it had sunk with great dignity on its first trip.